June 1, 2009

These are 2 different issues, the unanimous Supreme Court said today. And Justice Ginsburg, the author of the opinion, schools the Sixth Circuit in the law of issue preclusion:

[M]ental retardation for purposes of Atkins, and mental retardation as one mitigator to be weighed against aggravators, are discrete issues. Most grave among the Sixth Circuit’s misunderstandings, issue preclusion is a plea available to prevailing parties. The doctrine bars relitigation of determinations necessary to the ultimate outcome of a prior proceeding. The Ohio courts’ recognition of Bies’ mental state as a mitigating factor was hardly essential to the death sentence he received. On the contrary, the retardation evidence cut against the final judgment. Issue preclusion, in short, does not transform final judgment losers, in civil or criminal proceedings, into partially prevailing parties.

9 comments:

Isn't it ironic that the Court is reversing the vacation of an order to grant habeas in an opinion that will arguably lead to more habeas relief? Issue preclusion/collateral estoppel is the favorite conservative judicial theory designed to limit appeals to federal courts from state criminal convictions.

@David: At least the 6th got a signed opinion. Today's other decision was an even more emphatic 5-page Per Curiam bench-slap directed at the Tennessee Court of Appeals. Still, the treatment accorded the 6th today is usually reserved for the 9th.

"Otherly gifted" is the euphemism now for "mental retardation," or so I've been told. I'm surprised that they used this dated language, as well as IQ points (anything over 70 means the defendent is not otherly gifted or mentally retarded according to the attached document). Most people don't believe in IQ points any mo'.

If you killed someone now, and they give you an IQ test, I guess the point would be to fail it, if you feel like having at least the "mitigating" factor on your side: I mean, if you had an IQ over 70, you'd want to come out as under 70, right?

Lennie in Of Mice and Men was retarded. This pardon for the retarded is a chance to show the Law Court' civilized side and still apply a death penalty to the planners of murder with aggravated circumstances, in those few states who care about their citizen's lives anymore.

Strange how, when a murderer was caught in the act and the proof indisputable in earlier decades, that the insanity defense was the last resort of a defense attorney; when the Supreme Court restricted use of that, all of a sudden there was a rash of mental retardation defenses in open-and-shut cases. Not that I'd imply abuse of the cretin defense...

Sci-Fi writer Alfred Bester wrote of an alternative to execution in his book The Demolished Man. The entire book implies that "demolition" is a euphemism for execution, when in fact on the very last page we discover that demolition is in fact personality destruction, with the body preserved alive and a new mind developed into it.